The fonts have been changed from Bitstream Vera to DejaVu. I don't notice any difference between the two.

Ebooks can be sorted by author or by title. If like me your books are arranged in folders by author this would not be used, but it is a great feature if you don't use folders.

When I first loaded a book using the new firmware absolutely nothing appeared on the screen. I had to manually select a font size before the book was displayed. I tried this several times after turning the reader of and on again. After playing with it for a while this behavior stopped.

The Zoom rate now shows point sizes instead of percentages. It also shows how the fonts will appear with the letters ABCabc displayed in each font size. The font sizes are 12, 16, 18, 20, 24, 32 and 40. The jump between 12 and 16 is huge -- I wish they would add a 14.

There is a new hyperlink setting. If the book displays hyperlinks (such as the contents page of a magazine) you can use the direction buttons to highlight a hyperliink and jump to it with the OK button.

The right and left direction buttons now can turn pages of ePub books (finally!).

This firmware update adds some great new features but I wonder why it acted so peculiarly when I first used it.

I haven't done it yet. I had a problem accessing the download via FireFox(on Ubuntu 9.10) so I switched to IE(on XP w/sp3) and I was able to download the file.

I read over the instructions which include the warning that it will switch to Polish and how to revert to english.

It also warns about backing up the 100 books from internal memory to an SD Card as hey will be lost. This makes me wonder whether I will have to re-authorize my reader with ADE afterwards and burn up another life of 6 lives before count reset required.

I'll do the update and let then report here in this post my finding for ADE.

John

***Update

FW Update went w/o a hitch. NOTE: I went from FW 0.18g to 0.20g.
ADE DRM was NOT impacted and what books I left in internal memory were still there (some DRM'ed and one non DRM - 4 in total). So I guess it just needs some free memory as work space for the install.

Hurray!
The left & right arrows now do paging in ePub.

The right side page numbers in ePub books are now very small (big change from FW 0.18g).

I am not sure about PDF in FW 18 but in FW 19 the arrow keys do paging with "Text Flow ON". If "Text Flow" is off then you have to use the paging buttons. I used a "Kindle Users Guide" as a bench mark and with "Text Flow ON" I think it this version does a better job than before but I didn't open the Doc in FW 18 just to refresh my memory.

I never saw the bookmark problem in FW 18 but it seems to be working the same in FW 20.
It remembers the font settings etc.

I see what the other poster meant about a blank page until you select settings and font zoom within an open book. It defaults on 12 and when you select another font size such as 18 the text appears. He stated this issue should straighten out with more use. Well he is right. I accidently hit an ePub manual while looking for a PDF and it opened with the default setting of font size 12 and displayed the text right away. This issue did not happen within a txt doc. HTML docs work as before.

I can't really notice a difference with the font style change. They must be fairly close in style. I use the serif and it is as expected - very pleasing to my eyes.

I also noticed that I did not lose the entries in my "Recent Reading" list with this update.

That's all for now. As for as I can tell with the first few minutes of use this firmware firmware doesn't seem to have removed any functions or degraded them.

After several days, I don't think I can find any other changes than already noted
except a regression introduced in 0.19 where say in an epub you have a table of contents, you get pages of 8 items per page of table of contents. The 8th item when it's corresponding button was pressed, did nothing, This functionality existed
in 0.18 and was even more vexing for me than the loss of font size stickiness as noted by Mr. Pockets, as I read a lot of magazine content and would have to back up from item 1 of the next page of the table of contents to item 8 on the previous page of TOC. Many keypresses. Works now.
As someone else mentioned the hyperlink function is great for magazines, I love it and I specifically requested that from them. Now, if we can only get them to return the epub font stickiness, our ereaders will be complete.

Aluraread, after reading your post I tried out the TOC/ button 8 problem and did not find an issue. it would jump to the corresponding chapter. I know it use to be a dead key. I acknowledge that it was dead in .018 but when I updated directly to .20g the issue was resolved on my unit.

I wonder if others are experiencing this contradiction between our findings.

I upgraded to 0.20g directly from 0.18g, skipping 0.19d. My language switched to German not Polish. Recovery to English is the same, though: press 5,1,1,4

I don't think the update actually "changes" the language setting. I leaves your setting unchanged at the language position in the menu selected.

In 0.19d, English is in position 3. In 0.20g, Polish is in position 3 and English has been "bumped" to position 4. Anyone using English in 0.19g would now get Polish.

In 0.18g, English is in position 2. Position 2 is German in 0.19g and also 0.20g, which is why I ended up in German after the upgrade, and why updates from 0.18g to 0.19d result in English becoming German.

I suspect that if your chosen language is French or German, then the language won't change after an upgrade because the position of these languages in the menu hasn't changed.

I recently upgraded to ALP Firmware .20g and am happy I did. It's nice to have the hyperlink functionality and a third option for turning pages with epubs. Thanks to all the early adopters for their insights above.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BoxOfSnoo

The Hyperlink function is confusingly under "Settings"...

Yes, the hyperlink function is under Settings, but it seems that at least with epub documents (in my experience), if there are hyperlinks on a page you merely need to press the OK button to have the first link highlighted - so no need to go to "Settings" at all. (I haven't tried this with other formats yet.)

So it looks like version 20g is preferred over 20i right now, but the Aluratek website is only allowing me to download 20i. Would anybody happen to have a copy of the 20g firmware that they could send to me? I'm not using mine right now and am going to lend it to my sister for a while so I would like to have the firmware up to date before I give it to her.

Concerning the point size,
It seems rather silly to me to even add pointsize 36 and 40 to a reading device, since you'll only get a few words on the screen at any given time!
pt 14 IS the sweet spot for me,so why keep it out?
At times it may be nice to have a pt smaller. The smallest it should display text is pt 10 or pt 9. I wish they would have incorporated these font sizes too, because the display can display it, and for people with good eyes, having more words per screen is a plus!

If you ask me, having 7 or even 5 pt sizes is rather useless, since most people will be using only upto 3 fontsizes anyway!
The Astak Reader Pro has a real e-ink screen (also 5") and smallest font size is around 8pt, and still readable, but it's screen is 800x600 instead of 640x480 like on the jetbook.